Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Why do smart people believe stupid things?

Transcript

Why do smart people believe stupid things? · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:03
  G'day humans!
• 0:04
  Welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
• 0:07
  Here's a doozy for you!
• 0:08
  Why do such smart people believe so many stupid things?
• 0:14
  Have you ever felt infuriated by a friend's refusal to see things clearly?
• 0:20
  To see things your way?
• 0:21
  Do you ever notice people signing on to whole batches of beliefs according to the tribe that they belong to instead of judiciously thinking through each point on the basis of its merits?
• 0:33
  Do you ever feel alienated by how confident someone might seem in a particular opinion that you're pretty sure they don't have very good reasons for being so confident about?
• 0:44
  And do you ever wonder, more importantly, how to avoid those cognitive pitfalls yourself?
• 0:49
  Owen Fitzpatrick is a psychologist who has all the answers.
• 0:53
  He's a fascinating guy.
• 0:54
  He spent two decades studying persuasion, belief formation and propaganda.
• 1:01
  And his work has taken him all over the world to the kinds of places where people believe very different things from what we believe.
• 1:06
  Like North Korea and Afghanistan under the Taliban.
• 1:11
  And nowadays he's noticing that some of the same kind of propaganda instincts, some of the same kind of groupthink that he's seen in places like that, are beginning to emerge in Western democracies.
• 1:22
  His new book is called Is Inner Propaganda?
• 1:25
  And the propagandist in question is a little dictator who lives rent-free inside your head, telling you all kinds of stories about the world and about yourself and everything.
• 1:34
  your self-worth or otherwise.
• 1:36
  Owen joins me to help us understand how we form beliefs, how the modern landscape is changing, what you're encouraged to believe, how we might think about compliance and defiance and certainty and accuracy, and why sometimes it is the very smartest people in the room who hold the most stupid beliefs.
• 1:56
  I hope you enjoy as much as I did the one and the only, Owen Fitzpatrick.
• 2:02
  .
• 2:08
  The stories in the book are incredible, partly because you're a very peripatetic person.
• 2:12
  You've been wandering around all over the place.
• 2:14
  I don't know whether it's true that the various crazy regimes that you've been to were there as purely motivated by research into the way that propaganda works and the way that truth operates, or whether that is just a fig leaf for you wanting to go to interesting places.
• 2:31
  But either way, how did you end up in places like North Korea?
• 2:36
  I think, as you said, it was a combination of two things.
• 2:39
  I wouldn't say it was like an afterthought.
• 2:41
  I would say that one of the main reasons I was fascinated with, let's say, North Korea was trying to understand what it's like to live in a propaganda regime, because I've been obsessed with cults and propaganda since I was a teenager.
• 2:52
  So for me, that was definitely largely promoted by the idea of, I want to experience this from the inside.
• 2:58
  I want to see what's going on.
• 3:00
  I want to understand it.
• 3:01
  I want to watch persuasion, real blatant persuasion in this form in real time.
• 3:07
  For Afghanistan, there was definitely more of a combination.
• 3:10
  I partly, probably about 40, 50% wanted to know about the beliefs that they have and their beliefs about America, their beliefs about themselves, their beliefs about the Taliban, their beliefs about Pakistan.
• 3:23
  I wanted to understand their dynamics there.
• 3:25
  And I did, you know, I interviewed a few people there.
• 3:27
  And also the degree of extremism that exists in that kind of culture.
• 3:32
  But also there was a part of it which was obviously I want to be able to know what it's like to be in a place where they're experiencing what they're going through.
• 3:42
  And it was still quite dangerous at the time.
• 3:44
  So when was it?
• 3:46
  This was 2012.
• 3:48
  It was during the Olympics in 2012.
• 3:52
  And there was still like there was three bomb attacks in Kabul every day there.
• 3:55
  But I mistakenly – That was just after the surge, right?
• 3:58
  Obama's surge.
• 3:58
  Yeah.
• 3:59
  Yeah, and I didn't, well, at the time, I didn't assume, I thought I knew that it was still dangerous, of course, but I didn't really realize it was as dangerous when I got like my guide on day one wasn't my guide on day two, because his brother was killed in a bomb attack by the Taliban.
• 4:15
  And I ended up going to a sort of a funeral experience for him.
• 4:19
  Yeah.
• 4:20
  But it was it was it was it was awful.
• 4:23
  But once more, it's because the news didn't cover it.
• 4:26
  And I think the availability bias that the
• 4:28
  idea of getting us to focus on these are the things in the news now.
• 4:32
  I mean, I think that's part of the whole process as well that kind of really stood out to me is that I walked in there thinking I was experiencing these kind of things and when I came back, I'm like, it's just the same thing.
• 4:42
  It's just...
• 4:43
  made a lot more subtle and more sort of sophisticated and less blatant, less in your face.
• 4:51
  But it's happening at a rapid rate everywhere.
• 4:54
  And I think that we're missing a lot.
• 4:57
  Manipulation from the media, positioning specific narratives.
• 5:00
  So the main sort of gist of what I believe is...
• 5:05
  impacting us now in society is that our brains are being drawn to particular stories out of the billions of different stories they could tell the news depending on what channel you're watching and again in america you're talking cnn fox news just to keep things simple cnn has a selection of narratives that it will pursue because it serves the agenda fox news is a selection of narratives it will pursue and once it's selected those narratives it then has an angle on each
• 5:31
  And so I believe that we also, as human beings, we have the exact same thing.
• 5:36
  Depending on what we feel at the time, our brains look for certain things that are aligned with what we feel.
• 5:42
  And we then look to create narratives or stories very quickly about them.
• 5:45
  So we are great at jumping to conclusions.
• 5:48
  I think we're missing the nuance.
• 5:49
  And that's one of the things that intrigues me and is what's driven a lot of the work that I've done trying to understand beliefs.
• 5:55
  And when you say you came back from Afghanistan and you thought, well, we're sort of doing the same thing just in a different way or it's increasing at least, what was the difference between places like North Korea where there is a single obviously pushed narrative and places like Afghanistan where presumably the narratives are much more, I don't want to say sophisticated, but complicated and interwoven?
• 6:18
  Well, I think they have a great deal in common because in, let's say, Afghanistan, again, look, this is based upon my experience there.
• 6:26
  So we're not talking about me going into Afghanistan and then automatically going, well, I know how this country runs.
• 6:31
  You weren't conducting a formal scientific poll of every last Afghan.
• 6:37
  I appreciate the qualifier there because one finds that one does talk a lot to Afghanistan.
• 6:42
  the Thomas Friedman types who go to Cairo for a weekend and talk to a cab driver and come back going, let me tell you what the Middle East thinks.
• 6:49
  Oh, yeah.
• 6:50
  Yeah.
• 6:51
  I mean, there's only one thing worse than somebody telling you that they know exactly what's happening in a place because they've been there.
• 6:57
  And that's someone telling you they know exactly what's happening and not having been there.
• 7:00
  Yeah.
• 7:02
  Although strangely, sometimes I have more respect for the latter, because at least they've been they've presumably done a bit of reading.
• 7:10
  It is possible to get, I think, a more sophisticated understanding of a place by studying it than by going there for a weekend.
• 7:16
  But let's park that for a moment.
• 7:18
  I mean, I think that the goal is to be able to do both, right?
• 7:20
  So, for example, when I was in North Korea, whenever you go on, let's say, these guided tours, I was individual.
• 7:26
  So I went myself and I just had two guides and went around everywhere with them.
• 7:31
  Whereas I remember at one point we overlapped with a group.
• 7:36
  And I was, I could hear the group and they were talking to each other and they were like, oh my goodness, this is so ridiculous.
• 7:41
  This is obviously propaganda.
• 7:42
  And I felt good that I didn't have to listen to that because I wanted to get as fresh a perspective.
• 7:47
  I wanted to hear, try to understand the beliefs of the folks that were bringing me on these platforms.
• 7:54
  tours around, look how amazing and look how beautiful everything is, without the filter of, oh, this is so dumb.
• 7:59
  I think sometimes there's an arrogance that we can bring to other cultures.
• 8:03
  I certainly brought that arrogance myself when I went to places like North Korea, thinking to myself, oh, my goodness, it must be so brainwashed and deluded.
• 8:10
  And then when I went there, these were smart people.
• 8:13
  These were sophisticated.
• 8:14
  These people had great sense of humor, sarcasm, right?
• 8:17
  Things that I did not expect and kind of stumped me.
• 8:21
  But when you ask about the question of the difference between, well, let's even take North Korea and America, right?
• 8:27
  Like...
• 8:28
  We've one point of view in North Korea that's approved.
• 8:31
  In America, I'm being glib now because I know there's a lot more nuance, there's freedom of expression, and people are a lot more deep on these topics.
• 8:38
  But generally, you've got two sides to most issues, right?
• 8:40
  We've got one point of view in North Korea.
• 8:42
  We've got two in America.
• 8:43
  You've got the left and the right.
• 8:45
  Now, okay, there's fragmentation happening, especially nowadays.
• 8:48
  But there's still an orientation to go, this is the line that you are part of.
• 8:53
  This is your tribe.
• 8:54
  Therefore, what's important for you is to pay the membership dues, which is often, I believe, the same thing as my tribe.
• 8:59
  And as a result of that, they allow me to be part of that group.
• 9:03
  And if I don't believe, if I don't drink the flavor aid, then I'm going to get kicked out of that group.
• 9:08
  Therefore, a lot of the times we manufacture the reality, we engineer the truth so that we can maintain membership in that group.
• 9:16
  And in North Korea, we just get fed it.
• 9:18
  It's just, you know, you want to watch the news there.
• 9:20
  The news there was some of the most positive, uplifting things I've ever seen because it was all, look how great the country is.
• 9:27
  It was wonderful.
• 9:27
  And, you know, it's nonsense.
• 9:28
  Yeah.
• 9:29
  But it still felt better than going back to, look, let me tell you all the reasons why we're broken.
• 9:34
  And let me villainize this particular group so you can hate them.
• 9:37
  And I just feel that we have a sort of a smugness when we look at other cultures dismissing them because they don't believe the same things we do.
• 9:45
  And there's a good reason for that because sometimes there's despicable fear.
• 9:49
  behaviors that we find repulsive whenever we look at different cultures.
• 9:53
  But I think we're very quick to judge and then find our brains have a remarkable ability to justify why, again, we're on the right side, why we're good.
• 10:02
  I hadn't thought about the positive aspects of living in a, an autocratic totalitarian dictatorship, which is that they always want to pretend that everything's better than it is.
• 10:13
  Like I suppose psychologically that we could do with 10% more Kim Jong-un
• 10:19
  Ill. Who's the current one?
• 10:20
  Kim Jong-un?
• 10:21
  10% more Kim Jong-un.
• 10:22
  I'll put that on a bumper sticker.
• 10:24
  I was going to say.
• 10:25
  Yeah.
• 10:27
  By the way, is Flavor-Aid a thing in Ireland?
• 10:30
  Is that what is... We'd say Kool-Aid.
• 10:32
  Flavor-Aid is actually...
• 10:34
  So with David Koresh, oftentimes it's called... Kool-Aid.
• 10:39
  Kool-Aid, but actually the real term was Flavor Aid.
• 10:42
  Is that correct?
• 10:42
  So it was actually Flavor Aid, not Kool-Aid.
• 10:43
  Wow, drinking the Flavor Aid.
• 10:45
  That's it.
• 10:46
  That your Irish literary pedantry is impressive.
• 10:51
  Like the fact that Kool-Aid becomes Flavor Aid because technically there wasn't the registered trademark Kool-Aid that Koresh used.
• 10:59
  I was just going to say I felt sorry for the Kool-Aid management.
• 11:04
  They were like, it wasn't even our stuff, you know?
• 11:07
  That's right.
• 11:08
  Although they've gotten a lot of publicity out of it.
• 11:10
  I mean, you can't buy that, really.
• 11:13
  Were you able to break through with your North Korean handlers at all and connect with them in any way that gave you a glimpse of what they actually believed?
• 11:22
  With one of them, yes.
• 11:23
  With one of them, we sat down, we had a few drinks and, you know, a few beers.
• 11:30
  And we got chatting.
• 11:31
  And she was asking me about what I do for a living.
• 11:33
  So I said, my psychologist.
• 11:35
  And she said, what's that?
• 11:36
  Right.
• 11:36
  So I've never had to explain.
• 11:37
  Like, people always know what a psychologist is.
• 11:39
  So I'm like...
• 11:41
  And I was stuck.
• 11:42
  So I was like, well, I talked to you.
• 11:44
  And she goes, why?
• 11:45
  I'm like, to help you with your feelings.
• 11:47
  And she goes, how does you talking to me, helping me with feelings?
• 11:49
  So we got into this.
• 11:50
  But then she started to share some of her challenges and the insecurities she had and the worries she had.
• 11:55
  And the worries were about other people.
• 11:57
  And it was like the same kind of things, obviously different topics and probably different stakes, certainly different stakes.
• 12:03
  But.
• 12:04
  But the same challenges she had, the same problems that she discussed with me were the very same things I'd worked with with other people all around the world.
• 12:11
  Right.
• 12:11
  It wasn't it wasn't that, oh, she's immediately worried about this and that and the other.
• 12:15
  And I did ask her about, you know, her beliefs about what goes on with the world.
• 12:20
  But she had a more nuanced perspective than I expected.
• 12:22
  She was like, well, look, we don't really know enough about the rest of the world to know what's going on.
• 12:29
  this is what we believe about this, and this is our history and how we see things went on.
• 12:37
  And I was like, in my head, I'm going, no, no, no, you're supposed to be brain.
• 12:40
  You're supposed to turn around to me and tell me how things are and be absolutely convinced.
• 12:45
  And I'm supposed to be the smart one to go, ha, ha, ha, ha, ha.
• 12:48
  If only you weren't brain.
• 12:49
  Like, but that wasn't the reality.
• 12:51
  The reality was with her.
• 12:52
  Now, with other people I talked to, there was definitely the brave face.
• 12:56
  And she was the only person that I met there that I had deep conversations with.
• 13:00
  But she was surprisingly, and again, not, not.
• 13:07
  It was more a sense of she was comfortable enough to not be 100% sure.
• 13:12
  And that's what I kind of look for in people.
• 13:14
  Whenever someone only goes with a steel man argument on one side, they're absolutely like, this is the way it is.
• 13:20
  it automatically like flashes red for me because I know I'm like that about certain things.
• 13:25
  When it comes to Irish history, I have that bias going on.
• 13:28
  I'm convinced of my own narrative, my own way of thinking, but I know that's a bias.
• 13:33
  And I know that I want to believe that.
• 13:35
  And that's what I'm, you know, it's part of who I am.
• 13:39
  And when I see someone demonstrating that, I'm like, I see the mirror reflect that I'm going, they're just like me in that context, which means they're not necessarily as comfortable being challenged on this.
• 13:51
  I mean, it's so fascinating.
• 13:52
  I would love to know.
• 13:53
  I mean, North Korea is just incredible.
• 13:55
  We could spend two hours talking about North Korea, but I'd love to know the actual level of dissent and curiosity and questioning in your average North Korean town.
• 14:06
  Like how many people have seen videos of what life is like in South Korea?
• 14:12
  and are aware that something is fundamentally broken and how many people are, um, somewhere, you know, how many people are total devotees and how many people like most of us are somewhere in the, in the middle and what kinds of conversations do they have in the quiet of their own breakfast tables.
• 14:29
  I mean, me too.
• 14:31
  What I would say is this.
• 14:32
  I think that, again, we can see an example with lower stakes, probably not as extreme, but we can see examples around the kitchen tables and, you know, in America and Australia, right?
• 14:43
  If you bring up the term immigration, people have very different points of view, but not just that.
• 14:48
  when they're around their own people that believe the same thing as they do, how likely are they to challenge in that conversation?
• 14:55
  If I'm convinced that immigration is terrible and we need to get rid of people from outside or people from a different, and other people around me, my group also believes that, how likely am I?
• 15:07
  Like there's a concept called group polarization where the more that we spend time around people that have the same points of view, the more extreme our points of view become.
• 15:16
  And so I think that it happens, I won't even say a micro example, it happens quite blatantly as well in terms of America.
• 15:24
  And it's almost like as soon as you, and we've seen this in terms of American politicians, as soon as you diverge a little bit from the party you're in, as soon as you say, no, I'm not willing to accept that, often the more you're thrown to the curb if there's no other association, because shame is used as a tactic.
• 15:41
  to be able to get you to conform to behavior.
• 15:44
  And that works, but it only works if you've got nowhere else to go.
• 15:48
  Now, if you have somewhere else to go, and that new group opens up to you and says, here, come on in, you know, you can be a part of us, then you're much more likely to then move away from where the group was.
• 15:59
  And shame is no longer a useful tactic to try to manipulate you to doing what the group wants you to do.
• 16:05
  And I think that's something happening in the States, just as likely, I presume, it happens in North Korea.
• 16:10
  Yeah, that's interesting.
• 16:11
  I mean, I suppose that I'm just trying to put my finger on why I reflexively reject the too tidy a comparison between a place like North Korea and the sorts of groupthink that we have in Western democracies now.
• 16:26
  And I wonder if it has something to do with...
• 16:29
  what I might call vertical compliance versus horizontal compliance, in the sense that in North Korea, the obedience or the group think is always presumably or predominantly taking place along a vertical axis of worrying about whether or not people who are more powerful than you, above you, are going to punish you.
• 16:51
  And what you're talking about, what you're putting your finger on is really interesting about the sort of groupthink in the West that we've got, where the things that you say around the, I don't know why I said breakfast table, I suppose it should be at the pub or around the dinner table or, you know, when you're catching up with close friends, that that conformism and that groupthink.
• 17:09
  And that's likely enforced more horizontally, right?
• 17:12
  It's not that you're afraid that somebody more powerful than you is going to punish you.
• 17:16
  It's that you're afraid of being excommunicated from a tribe of your peers for not holding the agreed views about immigration or trans people or the family and Christianity or whatever the case may be.
• 17:32
  Which can be just as scary.
• 17:34
  I mean, if you're being thrown out of your tribe, this is your family, this is the people that love you unconditionally.
• 17:39
  And if you're in a situation where your very belonging to that group is dependent upon
• 17:46
  you know, conscribing to their particular beliefs and making sure you're always on the same page with them.
• 17:52
  It's a very hard thing to do.
• 17:53
  And that's why, like for me, I very much believe that a lot of beliefs will only change when they feel right and when they fit in with who we are.
• 18:01
  And the whole making sense piece about logic.
• 18:03
  I think we all live in a world where we think that logic is this like, you know, since Plato, when we talked about the importance of, well, you just need to argue and use reason and reason is the
• 18:14
  the thing that helps you escape Plato's cave, we have the ability to step out and be enlightened once we learn to use reason.
• 18:20
  But reason is often the thing that actually gets us tripped up more than anything because you could have the smartest people in the world having really dumb takes on things.
• 18:28
  I know people that I respect very much.
• 18:29
  We have a lot of those in culture at the moment.
• 18:31
  We have a lot of galaxy-brained, you know, Silicon Valley tech bros spouting off utter nonsense in terms of culture and, yeah.
• 18:40
  And they're super smart.
• 18:42
  They're super smart.
• 18:43
  But just because you're smart doesn't make you write about everything.
• 18:48
  And unfortunately, the smarter you are, often, that means that you might well be really, really sophisticated and skilled at argumentation or rhetoric.
• 18:56
  So often these smart people are able to win an argument.
• 19:00
  So you could have a super smart person and they can make an argument for flat earth theory and make it sound plausible and reasonable because they're so clear and so clever in the way in which they can organize their argument or organize the premises by which they use it.
• 19:17
  And so to me...
• 19:19
  I think we need to be a little bit more nuanced about the actual topics and get back to that.
• 19:24
  Because I think in this world, as a shortcut, because there's so much uncertainty and there's so much deception, and now with AI, with deep fakes and whatnot, a large part of it is, oh, who do I trust?
• 19:35
  And therefore, whatever they say, I'll just buy into.
• 19:37
  The problem is now all of a sudden, we're trusting the person regardless of what they say because we're part of their tribe.
• 19:45
  And even though it's not like, to your point, it's not like a hierarchical thing, to a degree it is, because these are thought leaders, or as I call the belief leaders, they're people that are guiding us towards believing a certain perspective or point of view.
• 19:57
  And therefore, we see that as, well, I'm the kind of person who believes the same thing as this person who I'm listening to on a podcast all the time.
• 20:04
  Yes, I mean, I...
• 20:05
  Yeah, sorry, I finished that thought.
• 20:07
  I was going to say what I appreciate about your style, and I know you're not great with compliments either, but you're more nuanced, and you're always looking at it from both sides.
• 20:16
  So when I listen to your perspective, I rarely hear you dogmatically.
• 20:20
  In fact, I never hear you dogmatically saying, this is the way it is.
• 20:23
  And I think we need more people like that, because what I normally hear, and this is from people I respect are super smart people,
• 20:30
  But they've got one point of view on a particular topic, and they are just a steel man, and they dismiss anything that contradicts them.
• 20:37
  They won't even open themselves up to have conversations about it.
• 20:39
  And I think when you're in that mode, it's like the depth of your programming is revealed in the speed of your anger, how quickly you are.
• 20:46
  And again, I put myself in the same group and that the certain things that you argue with me about, I've got...
• 20:51
  you know, blinders on.
• 20:53
  But I try to recognize whenever I hear nuance, I'm much more likely to open it to and I think we need to exalt nuance as a quality to look for more in society.
• 21:03
  Because I think it's, it's fading fast compared to the noise of certainty, which is so tempting, and something that we adore.
• 21:13
  Because if someone comes in with certainty, well, we can follow them.
• 21:16
  And the more uncertain we feel in society, the more we crave this person who's certain with conviction to lead us in the direction they want us to go in.
• 21:25
  Well, thank you for the compliment.
• 21:27
  I mean, I wonder whether or not there is also a shtick of uncertainty that I'm finding it hard to think about, which maybe you can help me wrestle with, where –
• 21:38
  In actual fact, I think a lot of the more pernicious waves of ideas and bullshit that we're being buffeted by at the moment don't code themselves as North Korean-style propaganda or as certainty.
• 21:53
  There's a lot of just asking questions, like just trying to have the more sophisticated and nuanced approach.
• 21:59
  I mean, Tucker Carlson's furrowed brow does a lot of work in culture at the moment.
• 22:06
  You know, the kind of like, I mean, why, you know, is Israel?
• 22:11
  And, you know, there's like, you know, why can't we just have these honest, open conversations?
• 22:17
  There's, you know, all we want to do.
• 22:18
  So I almost feel like this...
• 22:22
  I don't want to call it a brand of mine, but I suppose a mission of mine to sort of try to think things through in ways that are going to encourage people to be marginally more empathetic towards ideas that they might otherwise think are wrong or beyond the pale.
• 22:39
  It's kind of being contaminated by a bunch of people pissing in the pond.
• 22:43
  and using the same style of rhetoric as a way of putting their thumb on the scale of... Elon Musk's just asking questions about whether or not Europe is going to end up in a civil war because of Muslim migration.
• 22:57
  Now, actually, that's a bad example, because Elon actually does say that he's confident in the outcome, that Britain's going to have a civil war within 20 years.
• 23:04
  But what do you make of...
• 23:08
  certainty disguising itself as humility.
• 23:11
  I mean, it almost reminds me of the religious, you know, don't mean to offend you if you're a good Irish Catholic, but the religious persona of the humble servant of God and who are we to know the mysteries of the universe
• 23:25
  And scientists are very arrogant, thinking that they've answered all of the fundamental questions.
• 23:31
  We are but meek servants and have no idea about the purpose of the cosmos, except for who created the cosmos, why he created it, how you can talk to him and what happens after you die.
• 23:42
  Apart from that, we're very humble.
• 23:44
  You know, it's kind of the same trick and it leaves me a little lost.
• 23:48
  So to me, there's a couple of things.
• 23:50
  First of all, that particular example, I think a large part of it comes down to a persuasive technique sort of I refer to as – and I think someone else has mentioned this before, but it's the reluctant conclusion.
• 24:01
  It's like, you know, I didn't want to believe this, but actually, let me tell you, I didn't want to believe this, but actually, this is what the way things are.
• 24:08
  This is actually the way the world works.
• 24:10
  Actually, it's the Jews.
• 24:12
  The actually dot, dot, dot always ends up with, you know, it's the Jews or it's the Muslims.
• 24:17
  Well, it's a minority group.
• 24:18
  So it could be, yeah, it's the Jews, it's the Palestinians, it's the Muslims, it's women, it's, you know, choose your group to attack, right?
• 24:22
  But the challenge with it is, is that if you look at the sophistication of the technique, it's, you know, it's, you know, it's, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's
• 24:35
  it's always easy to ask questions.
• 24:37
  So if you look at it, the opposition of in any government of a democracy, it's always good to be on their side because they can always attack.
• 24:45
  It's very easy to point out all the things wrong with what you do.
• 24:49
  It's not so easy if you turn it around and now I have to actually fix them myself.
• 24:53
  But there's also something else that I think happens.
• 24:55
  And this is sort of a throwaway line that is used as a one-liner that immediately dismisses things.
• 25:00
  And this is everything from, as soon as you say fake news,
• 25:03
  It's called thought stopping from a cult perspective, and it's used to be able to go, do not think anymore.
• 25:09
  Like, you know, just say this and the person will stop thinking.
• 25:13
  Ben, what's his name, used to say, my facts don't care about your feelings.
• 25:19
  Ben Shapiro.
• 25:19
  Right.
• 25:20
  Yeah, Ben Shapiro.
• 25:21
  Again, it's a nonsense statement, but immediately it may...
• 25:25
  gets the people who already agree to him to go, yes, great.
• 25:28
  But it's a one-liner that means nothing, like fake news, or like Hillary Clinton, I think she mentioned the deplorables.
• 25:35
  So automatically that's saying, now we don't have to listen to them because of the deplorables.
• 25:40
  Yeah.
• 25:40
  There's a lot of that going on in the vernacular of the social commentary or the political commentary, rather, between the left and the right in America.
• 25:49
  And it's very easy to do.
• 25:51
  And it gets a lot of clicks and it gets a lot of attention and people love it.
• 25:55
  But it's stopping us from actually having a conversation because, once again, it's...
• 26:00
  achieving the ends that they want, which is the people on my side don't even worry about any argument.
• 26:06
  It's strawmanning the other side's argument.
• 26:08
  It's saying they're full of nonsense.
• 26:10
  They don't know what they're talking about.
• 26:12
  It's just because they're anti-Muslim.
• 26:15
  It's just because they're anti-Semitic.
• 26:16
  It's just because they're this.
• 26:17
  We don't have to listen to them because that is the agenda that they have.
• 26:23
  Therefore, forget everything that they've said.
• 26:26
  It doesn't matter what they say.
• 26:27
  It's nonsense.
• 26:28
  And I think that's a problem...
• 26:29
  But it's not coding itself that way, right?
• 26:32
  I mean, facts don't – I don't want you to get away with just saying that facts don't care about your feelings is a thought stopper without defending that claim.
• 26:42
  Because there'll be some listeners going, well, why?
• 26:45
  Why is that an illegitimate move?
• 26:48
  Because it depends what facts you're using, right?
• 26:51
  If we take that to its logical conclusion, that suggests that what he's saying from a facts point of view is he's always on the right side of the issue because he's using facts, whereas your feelings are, you know, he's effectively suggesting that your feelings
• 27:07
  responding because of your feelings and he's locked into facts and anyone who spent any time listening to him for example and again i'm not i don't mean to have a go with him specifically there's lots of people on the left and the right that are playing these kind of games but i'm saying if you listen it's it's like the actual choice of words the framing of everything there's emotion seeping in constantly in terms of the vernacular the vocabulary that he's using so if i'm telling you about facts
• 27:34
  I can give you facts without telling you the truth or the story about what those facts actually mean or framing them so that they serve my agenda.
• 27:42
  But if someone turns around and says he's known for looking at both sides of the issue in very full, logical, reasonable ways where he gives both sides a fair whack and explores it and really is interested in learning about the other perspective.
• 28:04
  Well, I'm not sure I'd buy into that.
• 28:06
  Whereas on the other hand, if you say that someone who is, let's say, using a lot less of that language, like, for example, you, right, when you talk about things, I hear both sides coming from you.
• 28:16
  I don't hear you lean.
• 28:17
  I hear you challenging things.
• 28:19
  And that's what I think we need more of from this.
• 28:21
  But I think we're, you know, people with a big platform tend to be demonstrated that sense of certainty.
• 28:28
  And as a result of that, people love it.
• 28:30
  And as a result of that, they tend to command quite the presence or influence of people to be more and more extreme from that perspective.
• 28:37
  And what I believe is we need to go in the opposite direction.
• 28:39
  That's all I'm saying.
• 28:40
  Yeah, no, very interesting.
• 28:41
  I mean, because I guess the Shapiro retort would be that in any limited fact claim, facts don't care about your feelings.
• 28:52
  So if you're talking about whether or not it's...
• 28:56
  uh, brutalizing for the United States to, uh, seal the Southern border.
• 29:04
  Uh, I don't know.
• 29:05
  And, uh, you know, uh, insist that people not seek refugee status when they cross the border on foot.
• 29:11
  then he might be able to say the fact of X number of arrivals into the United States is against the law, regardless of how you feel about that.
• 29:22
  And regardless of whether or not you find it unseemly what needs to be done legally in order to ensure that those people don't come in or are removed from the country.
• 29:31
  The problem, what I'm hearing you say, is when you sort of inflate that claim from a specific claim that can be resolved by the facts to wearing it as a cloak that implies that your entire position or worldview or conversational style is consistent with that.
• 29:52
  And everybody who disagrees with you is just a...
• 29:55
  fluffy headed, emotional fool and facts are always on your side.
• 30:00
  Is that fair?
• 30:02
  Yeah, that's fair.
• 30:03
  I would add one thing to it.
• 30:04
  And that is that a lot of times when, let's say, and I really don't want it to be just on him.
• 30:09
  I'm making the point.
• 30:10
  Yeah, we can remove him from the conversation.
• 30:13
  But the idea is that when he does talk about or when someone like that talks and says that,
• 30:20
  a lot of the times they say it, they're not actually using the example that you gave.
• 30:24
  So if someone turns around to me and gives me facts, and those facts are evaluated, and I can't really argue with them, and I don't like them, but they're facts, then that's fine.
• 30:34
  But if you listen to a lot of the rhetoric by people like that that are using it, they don't bring that out just when they have the specific facts.
• 30:42
  They'll bring that out as a one-liner that works very effectively so that...
• 30:47
  If they conflate something that's factually true with something that really isn't, they'll then go, my facts don't care about your feelings.
• 30:54
  So it's not like every single time that statement is made, it comes directly after him giving clear data.
• 31:00
  Yes.
• 31:01
  And that's my issue.
• 31:02
  I mean, the irony is that the line itself is an emotive punchline.
• 31:06
  The line itself plays on your feelings, right?
• 31:09
  I mean, the line itself is not an unassailable kind of logical syllogism that's beautifully, you know, that people are respecting because it's a fact.
• 31:16
  They like it because it makes them feel a certain way.
• 31:19
  Yeah.
• 31:19
  And the other part of it is that I forget who said this, maybe it was Robert Sapolsky, but it's like, my feelings don't care about your facts.
• 31:26
  And so when you feel a certain way, then you're less likely to listen to the information or facts.
• 31:32
  But again, I think we can select the problem is, is that this isn't a case of when we talk about, let's say, objective truth.
• 31:39
  If we talk about building something, the example I'd like to give is like a plane, right?
• 31:44
  You get that wrong, it doesn't work.
• 31:47
  The plane doesn't fly.
• 31:48
  So we have to make sure objectively that we're able to make as effective a prediction as possible.
• 31:53
  And that's great when it comes to engineering and some forms of science.
• 31:56
  But when it comes to most other conversations, there's a lot more nuance, a lot more complexity.
• 32:01
  It's harder for us to be able to pinpoint.
• 32:03
  There's a lot of the single cause bias where we think that what's the one cause that caused this?
• 32:08
  And it's actually a multitude of different factors.
• 32:10
  So whenever there's more ambiguity or uncertainty in a conversation,
• 32:13
  that it's very difficult for us to be able to turn around and, you know, talk in complex ways, because it seems like we don't have a point of view.
• 32:22
  And that's punished by going, oh, well, this is quite flaky.
• 32:26
  Whereas actually, what you're doing is being more accurate.
• 32:29
  Once again, for me, it's a barometer of whether or not to listen to someone differently.
• 32:35
  depending on the level of certainty that they have.
• 32:37
  And it doesn't mean that I don't believe that people, it's good when people have points of view.
• 32:41
  Of course they should, but they should have looked at the other side.
• 32:44
  I don't wanna hear them do a throwaway line.
• 32:47
  Oh, they're just fascists.
• 32:50
  They're just communists.
• 32:51
  That's a political one that's used a lot in the States.
• 32:53
  Because then it means I don't have to worry about them.
• 32:55
  I don't have to think about them.
• 32:57
  It's just like we talked about the thought stopping, which means I could sit in my own little bubble, believing my propaganda.
• 33:03
  And I think we all need to recognize we're constantly propagandizing ourselves, our brains made.
• 33:09
  Yeah.
• 33:09
  I mean, you're saying you're making me think of so many interesting things.
• 33:13
  One is that there's a real debate, a live debate in public health communication and in how we talk about things that we want to communicate to the broadest number of people.
• 33:25
  what level of certainty or uncertainty to express to the layperson as an institution.
• 33:31
  So the experience of COVID was a good example of, I mean, really, anytime the public has to listen to actual scientists, the scientists will invariably couch their knowledge in far more qualifiers than a layperson would.
• 33:47
  because that's the scientific method.
• 33:49
  They'll talk about how there isn't evidence that blah, blah, blah, where what they should actually say is we know X because that's the way that a lay person would talk.
• 33:59
  And we sort of struggled with this during COVID because on the one hand, public health authorities thought, well, we have to give a very clear message even when we don't know for certain that it's true because we want everyone to behave a certain way.
• 34:13
  And then there were other instances where the scientists would express scientific uncertainty that was actually interpreted as being too much.
• 34:21
  So, you know, as an example, you know, the initial mask recommendations were given with too much certainty that you didn't need a mask because, you know, basically the authorities wanted to reserve masks for frontline workers.
• 34:34
  And then there was a lot more uncertainty about the side effects of the vaccines, probably unnecessarily from people in the medical establishment.
• 34:43
  What's the right balance between expressing uncertainty and expressing confidence?
• 34:50
  Or is there no hard and fast rule?
• 34:52
  I don't think there's a hard and fast rule, but what I would say is that the problem during COVID, I think was because they were being scientists and because they were couching everything and being very, very careful, that lost trust because a lot of their predictions didn't come true.
• 35:07
  And they often said, we're not sure, this is what we think is going on.
• 35:10
  So they were always protecting themselves, but people don't necessarily always hear the couching.
• 35:15
  So the hedging doesn't always process.
• 35:17
  So we know technically that they've hedged,
• 35:20
  But even if they're wrong, they're wrong.
• 35:22
  It doesn't matter that they hedge that they could be wrong.
• 35:24
  We still will punish them mentally on that side.
• 35:27
  And then the problem was a lot of times then people gravitated away and said, well, if the doctors are wrong, then Uncle Bob must be right.
• 35:36
  And so they would listen to someone with, you know, this is what they're doing.
• 35:39
  on a podcast who has an opinion that 99 out of 100 doctors don't share is worth listening to, because who's to say?
• 35:46
  I mean, you're also reminding me that, of course, most people don't listen to the doctors directly or the scientists directly.
• 35:51
  We get it mediated through the media, which is another part of the problem.
• 35:54
  A lot of people are still under the impression that we were sold a false bill of goods on the vaccines because we were told that they would stop
• 36:09
  I don't think Fauci ever said that.
• 36:11
  Certainly doctors weren't saying that.
• 36:13
  They were always cautious.
• 36:14
  I mean, I was working as a radio broadcaster at the time, and I certainly never interviewed any expert who said that it would stop transmission.
• 36:20
  Who said that was Rachel Maddow on MSNBC, who interpreted what the doctors were saying and then said, if you get the vaccine, then the pandemic stops with you.
• 36:30
  You know, it stops it dead in its tracks.
• 36:31
  Yeah.
• 36:32
  Well, that's just scientific misinformation and it was irresponsible at the time.
• 36:36
  But unfortunately, we live in an ecosystem where we're not all going to be exposed to the perfect kind of Rosetta Stone of the Holy Grail of facts as they're handed down from scientists.
• 36:47
  But I think, sorry to interrupt, I think that's the issue.
• 36:51
  So when you hear that, we need to have sort of a red light going on that when someone may, like, if I'm talking to, if I'm talking to a medical professional and that medical professional gives me 100% sense of certainty, my antenna goes up because every medical professional that I've ever gone, they always hedge themselves.
• 37:09
  Any health journey you've ever been on, you're trying to figure out what's wrong.
• 37:13
  It's rare that they go, I know exactly what's wrong, unless they've done some sort of inspection and they can point to it.
• 37:18
  The overwhelming majority of the time, we think it might be this.
• 37:20
  We need to rule out this.
• 37:21
  We need to rule out this.
• 37:22
  This is the way it's supposed to be.
• 37:24
  But the problem is that if you don't get the answer you want, but you crave certainty, someone else that jumps on board with a conspiracy or with an anti-authoritarian or anti-medicine sort of background can then convince you.
• 37:35
  Now, that doesn't mean that they're wrong when they attack the medical establishment.
• 37:40
  Because the medical establishment might be, you know, trying to push a particular method, or they might be using the wrong, like, we have to hold people accountable, even if we agree with them, we can't just turn a blind eye to, let's say, pharma interests or whatever.
• 37:54
  But I think we just love to go to from one extreme to another.
• 37:57
  So if I'm either on the team, I'm either on Fauci's team, or I'm on Fauci is the devil and needs to be destroyed team.
• 38:04
  And I think that, you know, in most cases,
• 38:08
  the the truth lies somewhere in the middle we we desire the certainty and it's almost like tempting to have this like anger and this villain we love to have a villain and we love to be victims and this is etched into our psyche for most of the time and that's what the news knows and then when you have the likes of let's say the maddo example where she's like
• 38:29
  this is true, well, either that's misinformation or disinformation designed, even if it's for benevolent reasons, as soon as you lie to the population, you lose credibility with a large swath of them.
• 38:42
  And so when you're in that situation, you need to be able to, I think, we need to be able to train ourselves to recognize that.
• 38:50
  the language, the techniques that are used on us so that we don't immediately go, oh, well, they seem certain.
• 38:56
  And I know that I've listened to this program before and she's been right before, he's been right before, therefore they must be right about this.
• 39:04
  Well, no, they could be right 15 times and wrong the next one.
• 39:08
  And when people say, well, just do your own research,
• 39:10
  Well, no, don't do your own research because, number one, you probably don't know what research means.
• 39:15
  And number two, research for a lot of people who say do your own research, that means they've gone to, again, poor old Uncle Bob.
• 39:21
  But they've gone to Uncle Bob's channel.
• 39:23
  They've devoured all his anti-medical establishment propaganda.
• 39:28
  And therefore, they're like, oh, they're lying to us.
• 39:31
  And once again, I'm not saying that everything that Uncle Bob says is wrong.
• 39:35
  Some of what he says might be absolutely spot on.
• 39:38
  But as long as we just buy into the Uncle Bob narrative versus the medical narrative, we're playing a game.
• 39:44
  We're always going to lose.
• 39:45
  Yeah, I had a segment on my radio show, which was called Do Your Own Research.
• 39:50
  And it was an exhortation to encourage people not to do their own research.
• 39:54
  And so for half an hour, I would just talk to an unbiased expert about the issue that online a lot of people were saying you should do your own research about.
• 40:03
  myocarditis incidence as a result of the COVID vaccine, the increase in mortality in some countries after COVID that some anti-vaxxers were attributing to the vaccines and so on.
• 40:17
  I was like, it's way too complicated to do your own research.
• 40:19
  What are you talking about?
• 40:20
  Don't do your own research.
• 40:21
  How could you...
• 40:21
  How could you do your own research with the volume of papers that have been written and the amount of expertise that you would need in order to know what to pay attention to, how to couch certain conditions or qualifiers on epidemiological studies or something.
• 40:37
  Don't do your own research.
• 40:39
  And it's also a case of like, I'm arrogant enough to think that I can do research and catch up with people who've spent five years or even eight years in medical establishments.
• 40:50
  And I can go, I can listen to a few YouTube.
• 40:52
  I remember once the most ridiculous example of this was someone on LinkedIn.
• 40:56
  I think they said it.
• 40:57
  They said, you know, I think I can learn anything from YouTube.
• 41:00
  In fact, I'd be pretty confident that if I watched enough heart surgeries, I could, you know, on YouTube, I could perform a heart surgery.
• 41:09
  I'm like, bro, what kind of world are we living in, you know?
• 41:13
  Can I not put my hand up to be the first patient in that cardiology unit?
• 41:19
  I mean, the tribe thing is really interesting.
• 41:21
  I like what you said about tribes that are defined around villains and victims is interesting because it reminds me of –
• 41:31
  Not to invoke Elon Musk again, but I don't know if you saw Elon's interview with The Economist in July where she was the interviewer who's fabulous.
• 41:42
  Her name escapes me, but I can't remember.
• 41:45
  She was pushing him on Twitter.
• 41:46
  his remarks about Britain and she's British.
• 41:49
  And so she has a dog in the fight and she feels like he's deeply unconstructive by throwing his support behind these far right parties and ginning up anti-migrant sentiment.
• 42:02
  And she's no, you know, she's from the Economist.
• 42:05
  She's no woke, you know, super social justice, bleeding heart lefty.
• 42:09
  She's an old school, small L, you know, classical liberal, uh,
• 42:13
  who just thinks that we should use reason as much as possible.
• 42:16
  And to notice, and his retort was basically that he tends to be able to see the future better than other people can.
• 42:27
  And he has a good track record of making accurate predictions about the future.
• 42:32
  And often that gets him into trouble because people who can't see as acutely as he can and as accurately as he can find his remarks baffling or overblown the way that they would find such remarks from an alien from the future or a time traveler to be.
• 42:48
  Mm-hmm.
• 42:50
  And I thought that was a really interesting sort of cognitive trick that his brain is playing on him because he's taking his expertise in one field, presumably, in tech and business, and he's applying it to a totally different field.
• 43:05
  I mean, the interviewer made the point that he hasn't been to the UK in the past few years.
• 43:09
  She lives there.
• 43:10
  He's consuming a diet of curated, algorithmically selected...
• 43:18
  videos about what's going on in the UK and he's forming predictions about the future and he is deluded enough to think that the his ability to extrapolate from those things is what's salient here that that it's his vision and his extrapolation that is the relevant point rather than the data that he's using on which to base the
• 43:40
  prediction, which is all a bunch of bullshit that he's got from online.
• 43:45
  So, I mean, that's a good example, I think, of where you have a tribal... His followers are not... You know, the people who agree with his analysis of wokeness and immigration...
• 43:57
  are again presumably operating in this tribal space of villains and victims and sort of smuggling his credibility from one field into another field such that their allegiance and their group think becomes a list of checkboxes that you have to kind of believe in in order to be someone who really has their finger on the pulse of what's truly going on in the world.
• 44:22
  I think, yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot in what you've said that I would 100% agree with.
• 44:28
  With Elon Musk, the guy's a genius in many ways, right?
• 44:30
  He has, at least in the business world, seen the future and he has great perspectives when it comes to rockets, when it comes to Mars.
• 44:38
  His ambition is amazing and his creativity and the dogmatic way he approaches it, not to speak about him as a person at all from that context.
• 44:49
  Where I look at it as I go, once more, what I sort of mentioned earlier and what you were getting at there, just because you're an expert in one area doesn't mean, number one, you'll always be right in that area.
• 45:01
  And I'm sure if you look into it, every decision he's made business-wise hasn't been the best or smartest decisions, but he has made a lot of great bets.
• 45:09
  But just because you're right in one area doesn't mean you're right in terms of what's going on in society.
• 45:14
  It doesn't mean that you know about a country that you haven't set foot in in a long time.
• 45:18
  It doesn't mean that you're not the victim of the propaganda that you consume.
• 45:22
  I think a large part of it isn't actually about his point of view or his views.
• 45:26
  I think a large part of it comes down to, as you mentioned, his identity.
• 45:30
  And I think that when a person has a particular identity, that this is the kind of person I am, this is what I stand for, then you conform to that.
• 45:40
  If you look at it, and I think he's one of a few examples I can think of, this is just the theory I have.
• 45:44
  I'm not saying that this is, I've proven this in any way, shape or form, but I'd love to get your perspective on it.
• 45:49
  Is that I think a lot of people that believed on one side of the platform, let's imagine they were very much like, like if you take Tulsi Gabbard, for example.
• 45:58
  And you ask yourself, how did she go from being a Democratic nominee for president, or not the nominee, but competing for the nomination?
• 46:05
  Yeah, candidate.
• 46:07
  And how did she go from that to working in the Republican government?
• 46:11
  And I think a large part of it was the shift in identity when she was talking about the Democratic policies, and she was like, no, I don't buy into this, I don't buy into that.
• 46:21
  She challenged them on certain things.
• 46:23
  It didn't mean that she was automatically Republican, but then they kind of...
• 46:26
  It almost felt like, and again, I'm describing my feelings about how it seemed to go, but it felt like she was blacklisted to a great extent.
• 46:34
  And as a result of that, then the Republicans opened, and I know I'm simplifying this, but they opened up their arms to her and rewarded.
• 46:41
  You take RFK Jr., a little bit different, but again, same kind of movement.
• 46:45
  You take Elon Musk, once again.
• 46:47
  He repelled against, I think, the inverted commas woke movement a few years ago and kept going on that and then found a sort of a home in people that have a certain type of belief and then he kept pushing in that direction.
• 47:04
  So I think a large part of the beliefs that we hold
• 47:07
  we hold as a result of the identity that we associate with.
• 47:10
  And often that's because we're excluded from one, we go into the arms of the other.
• 47:15
  And it's like sometimes beliefs are things we fall in love with.
• 47:18
  And as a result of that, we defend them.
• 47:19
  But I think that there's a big myth here that we're all walking around like logical creatures, making the best predictions we can based upon all of the available data.
• 47:28
  And I think most of us don't do that.
• 47:29
  I think very few people do that.
• 47:31
  And certainly in this context, he definitely doesn't do that.
• 47:33
  Yeah.
• 47:34
  I mean, that doesn't mean he's bad in any other, like it doesn't mean he's not great in terms of business, right?
• 47:38
  Exactly.
• 47:39
  I mean, it's been, I think it's been very savvy of the MAGA movement to be such a big tent.
• 47:46
  And it's been very unwise of the sort of puritanical, illiberal left to be such a closed tent, because you know, the fact that RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard were able to enter the Trump administration
• 48:01
  The reverse is inconceivable.
• 48:03
  It's inconceivable that Kamala Harris would have invited into her administration, for example, an anti-LGBT family values conservative because they had come around to action on climate change and a more compassionate view on immigration or something like that.
• 48:23
  It's unimaginable that merely dissenting from a few of the...
• 48:29
  of the cardinal checkbox rules of the left would be sufficient to, of the right rather, would be sufficient for the left to allow you into the club.
• 48:40
  You would have to check all of them.
• 48:42
  Yeah, even look at what's happened at the moment, right?
• 48:45
  You have obviously a bit of a, again, to simplify, a bit of a split.
• 48:49
  So you have the traditional Democrats, and then you have the more social Democrats or democratic socialism.
• 48:55
  And even the democratic socialists who are, let's say, for example, in the example of Mamdami, you're getting a lot of like the public and loads of support, even then, you
• 49:06
  they didn't make it easy for him, right?
• 49:08
  They're not making it as easy for the candidates.
• 49:10
  And it's a little bit of a crisis of identity, but it's even when they're on the same side on most of the issues, it's still, if you don't conform entirely, we don't want you.
• 49:22
  And now they can't really, they can't keep doing that because the people are voting and that the way the people are voting is kind of making them go, if we don't jump on this board or if we don't at least open ourselves up to this possibility,
• 49:34
  We're going to find out.
• 49:35
  So I think that now that's starting to shift.
• 49:38
  But it's interesting as well, because when you now have Tucker Carlson and you have a few Candace Owens or whatnot, and you have them straying away from the MAGA movement, it's starting to get more interesting because now you've got more forced nuance.
• 49:53
  And you've got a more interesting sort of take in what's going on in society, which I think...
• 50:00
  In some ways, obviously, it's a bad thing.
• 50:02
  But in many ways, I think it's a it's better than it was, because at least now you've got kind of four points of view, as opposed to, yeah, I'm not I'm not sure I was thinking this, this, this was a question mark, over my head, when you were saying about North Korea, that there's one sort of point of view there.
• 50:18
  And in America, there's two points of view.
• 50:21
  In America, there is no longer two points of view.
• 50:23
  There are probably four or five.
• 50:26
  I guess if you were a political scientist, you could probably identify the groups.
• 50:30
  They'd be the isolationist, America first, Tucker Carlson, purist, slightly anti-Jewy, kind of virulently anti-Israel, conspiratorial universe of that version of the right, and
• 50:47
  which has a lot of wind behind its back, I would say, and is increasingly ascendant.
• 50:54
  You've got the Trumpist right, which is really now a loyalty test, essentially, to an individual, which I think is on its way out.
• 51:04
  You've got the traditional Republican Party, which has been moribund for a decade, the party of Trump.
• 51:11
  George H.W.
• 51:12
  Bush and whatever the people and Colin Powell and the people who would otherwise have who might have tried to oppose Trump.
• 51:19
  And then you've got the Democratic establishment party, the party of the Bidens and the Clintons, and then you've got the insurgent left full of very agitated anti-capitalist pro-Gaza types.
• 51:35
  And what's interesting about your analysis is that that doesn't actually, I don't think, mean that there's a greater diversity of thought because within each of those tribes...
• 51:46
  There really is just as much conformism.
• 51:48
  I mean, if you tell me what you think about Gaza, let's say, just to take one of the hottest things, issues at the moment, or Israel, I can probably with some degree of accuracy jot on the back of a napkin a whole bunch of things that you think about corporate taxation, climate science, and a whole bunch of other things.
• 52:10
  And I can probably get them pretty right.
• 52:13
  And so that just suggests to me that you've just got to, you know, instead of the one in North Korea or the two in America, you've now got four or five in America.
• 52:22
  But what we should be shooting for, presumably, is a genuinely heterodox perspective where as many people as possible are all over the map because they're trying to cobble together what is true about the world rather than...
• 52:36
  what is expedient for them to believe in order to conform either horizontally with their peers or vertically with the orange man who's going to excommunicate them from the party if they don't pretend that the last election was stolen.
• 52:50
  Yeah, I mean, I think, once again, I think I'm on the same lines as you.
• 52:53
  I think the only thing I would say, and I think you're right in terms of the four or five, I would say it's four.
• 52:58
  I think the dormant nature of the old school sort of Bush Republican Party is it doesn't weren't speaking about because I haven't seen any evidence of it in a while.
• 53:09
  But I think that the challenge is the way we describe them.
• 53:11
  So you use certain words there.
• 53:13
  that for, let's say, shortcut sake, I use certain words before you did to describe them to be very sort of reductionist in the way in which we talk about it.
• 53:25
  The problem is that very reductionism that we're both using can be part of the problem.
• 53:30
  Because as soon as I turn around and say, you know, everyone who's MAGA, they hate immigrants.
• 53:36
  Or I say everyone who is thing, like even using the word pro-Gaza as opposed to pro-Palestinian, right?
• 53:43
  These words matter a massive amount.
• 53:45
  And so I think what's problematic is that you have these rush to judgments that you make, that I make as well, that I've made a number of times.
• 53:56
  And it's in the effort to try to simplify the conversation we're having so that we both understand it.
• 54:01
  But every time we do that, we're guilty of consolidating an aura around a particular group, which means every single individual inside of that group has that.
• 54:12
  which stands against what you say, which I 100% agree with, which is we need to be looking at each issue with more nuance and trying to understand the other side.
• 54:22
  And the way I look at it is I've got strong views on a lot of things.
• 54:24
  I don't talk about them because, first of all, I'm a psychologist with opinions, but that doesn't mean I'm an expert in these spaces.
• 54:31
  I just have beliefs, right?
• 54:33
  I have convictions about it.
• 54:34
  But number two, most importantly, as soon as you mention what side you're on, immediately the other side stops listening.
• 54:40
  And my goal with the beliefs and my goal with the notion of inner propaganda is to try to get people to go, let's all take a step back and let's all start to interrogate our own beliefs and start to understand, am I really believing it because I believe it?
• 54:55
  Or am I believing it because it keeps me part of my tribe?
• 54:58
  And that's a hard thing to do.
• 55:00
  But I think if we want to make the society in any way better.
• 55:03
  we need to reckon with ourselves first.
• 55:05
  And I think we're all falling into this naive realism trap where, you know, well, I know the truth, but, you know, poor old Josh, he's still under the, you know, influence of this particular group and therefore this and that and the other.
• 55:17
  And I think we're living in a world where it's so easy.
• 55:19
  It's like watching professional wrestling.
• 55:21
  It's so...
• 55:22
  simple like child.
• 55:24
  It's like, you know, being being in school again, watching the childhood go back and forth.
• 55:29
  No one's having conversations.
• 55:30
  And I think the world is more complicated than that.
• 55:32
  So I think we need to take responsibility for the words we use.
• 55:35
  And when I describe a Republican or describe a, you know, democratic socialist,
• 55:40
  I don't just jump to the easy slogans that I've heard every politician that hates them use.
• 55:45
  Or if I love them, use the, you know, the Pollyanna version of how amazing they are.
• 55:50
  I think we need to go, OK, these are the people.
• 55:52
  This is what they seem to be liked for.
• 55:54
  This is the strong steelman argument for the Democratic Socialists.
• 55:57
  This is steelman argument for the Central Democrats, steelman argument for MAGA, and steelman argument for the Tucker Carlson's.
• 56:05
  Yeah, I think that's a very good instinct.
• 56:09
  And your criticism is right.
• 56:13
  What I would want in such a world is also a way of differentiating between the people who...
• 56:20
  are genuinely democratic socialists because they have thoughtfully considered all of the issues before them and they sort of happen to align with the various priorities of the party.
• 56:34
  And I would assume that Mamdani himself is such a person, right?
• 56:39
  He probably actually believes the things that he claims to believe.
• 56:42
  And then the outer sphere of hangers-on, who I guess I'm targeting when I use loaded language like pro-Gaza instead of pro-Palestinian.
• 56:51
  Because what I'm alluding to when I'm saying pro-Gaza is not the overwhelming majority of people who think that the Palestinians have been screwed over and that Israel has been guilty of doing awful things to them and that the Palestinians deserve better.
• 57:08
  That cohort of people would include most of the Jews in the world, for example, and would include a great many of Israelis themselves who are very conflicted about the plight of Palestinians.
• 57:19
  I would want a way to talk about a specific type of follower or groupthinky hanger on who has found a cause that they...
• 57:30
  subscribed to purely as a result of the sort of identity vibes that it gives them, not to get all facts don't care about your feelings, but it is basically an emotional tribal affiliation.
• 57:42
  And so the extent to which they're wearing a Palestinian headscarf on a university campus actually says anything about...
• 57:50
  their well thought through recommendations for what ought to happen in the peace process versus their general sense that they want to be on the right side of something and this is the side that their peers and their algorithms
• 58:09
  suggest they should be on.
• 58:10
  It'd be good if there was language for that so that we didn't have to, because we do sort of have to use caricaturing language in order to be clear that we're talking about one type of activist versus, you know, without wanting to denigrate people who have the reasonable version of the position.
• 58:28
  Yeah.
• 58:29
  I think the struggle, and I've struggled with this, trying to think through this, right?
• 58:33
  Because on the one hand, I feel what you're talking about is remnant of this notion of virtue signaling, right?
• 58:42
  We're signaling to people, look at how great I am, look at what side I'm on.
• 58:47
  And I see that a lot in terms of social media, where someone goes in a big rant and talks, and you can tell the difference between someone has thought it out.
• 58:54
  Like, I'll listen to someone who very much believes in what their point of view is,
• 58:59
  and someone who is very much regurgitating the token lines they have because they want you to see them as that type of person.
• 59:08
  And I think that both, well, I think the first person is necessary.
• 59:12
  I think we do need to be using social media to call out,
• 59:17
  the atrocities that are being committed in an accurate way based upon the evidence that we could see, because we can't rely on the news to do that.
• 59:25
  The news hasn't stepped up, let's say, for example, in the Middle East.
• 59:29
  It hasn't done a good enough job there.
• 59:32
  I think it's important to do that.
• 59:34
  To your point, I think there's an awful lot of people that will jump on the bandwagon.
• 59:38
  It's almost like, is it a cool thing to do this?
• 59:42
  Although I wouldn't be – I'd be leery of being too dismissive of their internal motivations.
• 59:48
  I don't want people to think that I'm implying that those people don't think that they're sincere.
• 59:53
  Like they're not – they don't think that they're doing it because they want other people to think highly of them.
• 59:59
  They truly believe that they're on the right side of the issue.
• 1:00:05
  And they may indeed be on the right side of the issue, right?
• 1:00:07
  But it's just what they're pumping out into the world has a whole bunch of consequences that they're not aware of.
• 1:00:14
  And they are arriving at their conclusions based on...
• 1:00:20
  what they don't realize is an extremely limited set of facts that may be out of context.
• 1:00:25
  And you don't have to be talking, we don't have to talk specifically about Gaza here.
• 1:00:28
  We could be talking about any one of a number of hot button issues.
• 1:00:31
  You could be talking about, you know, I don't know, puberty blockers for kids or whatever.
• 1:00:36
  Well, I mean, I agree with you in the sense that they don't always consciously.
• 1:00:40
  People aren't going, if I do this, this will allow me to achieve it.
• 1:00:43
  I don't believe they do that consciously most of the time.
• 1:00:45
  I'm sure there are some people that do it.
• 1:00:47
  But I think the challenge is a lot of times it's the kind of thing that we all want.
• 1:00:52
  Like what is social media?
• 1:00:53
  Part of social media is presenting content.
• 1:00:55
  the world, the version of you that you want people to see you as.
• 1:00:58
  So you make sure you airbrush your, I'm sure people airbrush their photographs and they make sure that they look as nice as possible on social media and they show the pictures of them on holiday.
• 1:01:09
  So a part of it is also, let me show you what I stand for and my morals or values.
• 1:01:14
  And again, it's something that people feel very strongly about, but I think there is a need for that.
• 1:01:20
  There's a need to call out.
• 1:01:21
  But the reason I struggle with it is,
• 1:01:24
  I also think that people don't always communicate based upon a lot of information.
• 1:01:29
  They're very quick to share things that aren't necessarily true, and that actually hurts their cause.
• 1:01:34
  So if you take, for example, feminism, the challenge, I think, with a lot of times with feminism, and I say this as a man, right, to add to it, but I think that
• 1:01:46
  When you turn around and you, for instance, take the word guys, right?
• 1:01:53
  You say the word guys inadvertently, meaning men and women, but you just happen to say it.
• 1:01:58
  There are some people that will attack you for that and say, oh my goodness, that's such a misogynistic thing to say, blah, blah, blah.
• 1:02:04
  So I think that if you attack everybody that diverges from what you think they should say, if they don't say the exact words I want them to say, then they are the enemy.
• 1:02:15
  And this is like, if you don't talk about what side you're on in an issue, then you're a coward, then you're this.
• 1:02:20
  If you don't conform to what I tell you, then you're this person.
• 1:02:23
  I think that's very destructive.
• 1:02:25
  Because I think if, like, for the things that I care about, I donate money for...
• 1:02:31
  I'll donate time.
• 1:02:32
  I'll do whatever I can to be able to do that.
• 1:02:35
  But me jumping on and telling everyone how horrible this is, that doesn't do that much for that cause.
• 1:02:43
  It does more for me than that cause.
• 1:02:45
  Well, I suppose people who do it think that it raises awareness.
• 1:02:49
  But tell me who isn't aware of it.
• 1:02:52
  Like someone reached out to me after some tragedy that happened a few years ago and said, hey, can you post about this?
• 1:02:59
  And I'm like, you know, why do you want me to post about it?
• 1:03:03
  Well, I need to raise awareness.
• 1:03:04
  I'm like...
• 1:03:06
  There is not one day in the last week that people haven't been talking about it.
• 1:03:09
  There is no awareness problem here, right?
• 1:03:12
  Everyone's aware.
• 1:03:13
  But I'm not in a position where, no, if you talk to me about psychology or belief, I'll give you my opinion.
• 1:03:19
  I'll give you my talk because that's what I'm equipped to do.
• 1:03:21
  That's what I've worked a lot of my expertise on.
• 1:03:24
  But in terms of my opinion, I've got lots of opinions.
• 1:03:26
  Some of them are great.
• 1:03:27
  Some of them are biased.
• 1:03:28
  Some of them are dumb.
• 1:03:29
  But what I want to do is focus on how I can add value to the world and make a difference.
• 1:03:35
  And the problem is if you have an opinion about everything and people have opinions about everything now, we jump to hot takes on everything.
• 1:03:41
  Oh, this is the way it is.
• 1:03:42
  But we do so based on incomplete information.
• 1:03:44
  And that actually does a disservice to our point of view.
• 1:03:47
  Because if I come out with some lie that's obviously not true and I use it to prove my point, but then it's shown as being debunked,
• 1:03:54
  it makes my perspective weaker.
• 1:03:56
  And it can make it easier for people to dismiss me because I haven't gone with a strong point.
• 1:04:01
  So with the feminism example, if you turn around and you say, you know, that we weren't guys, you're such a misogynist.
• 1:04:07
  If you're doing that for the small, you know, inadvertent examples where you don't mean to say it, you just say it.
• 1:04:14
  But the real misogynist can turn around and go, you can't say anything these days.
• 1:04:17
  So they get away with saying it's the same thing in terms of woke, right?
• 1:04:20
  There's a benevolent nature behind the notion of being woke.
• 1:04:23
  It used to be a term that came from a good place.
• 1:04:28
  But as soon as we start to get into the place where people were judged and said, if you don't believe the same thing as I do, you're this person.
• 1:04:35
  there was a big reaction, a negative reaction to that.
• 1:04:38
  It's like, do not try to put me in a particular place.
• 1:04:41
  Do not try to position me as a bad person just because I don't drink your flavor, right?
• 1:04:46
  And that's kind of how I feel is that you're doing a disservice to it.
• 1:04:50
  And I think that we need to, once again, pull back from that tendency to attack everything and start attacking what deserves to be attacked.
• 1:04:57
  When you see real examples of misogyny, real examples of racism, real examples of antisemitism, real...
• 1:05:03
  Because again, that word antisemitism is thrown around a lot.
• 1:05:07
  And there is a problem with antisemitism in the world today.
• 1:05:10
  Yes, I mean, it's been a terrible, terrible own goal of the same kind of shape as the own goals of the left for pro-Israel organizations to throw around antisemitism at anybody who criticizes Israeli policies.
• 1:05:27
  And my big problem with that is, Josh, is that as soon as you do that...
• 1:05:31
  that now galvanizes people who are actually anti-Semites, who are actually like have really negative, horrible perceptions of Jewish people.
• 1:05:40
  Because anti-Semitism or anti-Muslim, these are not new concepts.
• 1:05:45
  These have been around for thousands of years, literally.
• 1:05:48
  But the notion is that as soon as you turn around and you label everything as anti-Semitism, right, and you just, whatever a person says, a person criticizes the murdering of children and go, oh, well, you're anti-Semite.
• 1:06:00
  That takes away the energy of that word, and that word needs energy.
• 1:06:03
  We need to hold people accountable for real examples.
• 1:06:06
  There's a boy who cried wolf aspect to it as well.
• 1:06:10
  I try not to use that word except in quotation marks verbally.
• 1:06:16
  I also try to not use Zionist or anti-Zionist.
• 1:06:20
  I just think there are a bunch of words all across society that are –
• 1:06:25
  that have become so similarly woke, you know, and, you know, I appreciate that you put quotation marks around it earlier as well, because these things have just become stand-ins for a thing.
• 1:06:37
  You know, if you want to talk about Jew hatred, you can talk about that.
• 1:06:41
  If you want to talk about a unique bias against Israel, you can talk about that.
• 1:06:44
  If you want to talk about Israeli brutality and war crimes, you can talk about that, but it's just, it, it, it helps to be somewhat more specific.
• 1:06:52
  I think.
• 1:06:53
  I mean, this all makes me think about the inner voice in our heads, which is really the thrust of your latest work, where we've constantly got this analyst who's, well, analyst, critic, you say it's neither, it's actually a propagandist inside our head who is...
• 1:07:13
  judging our behavior and telling us stories about ourselves and about the world that we think is our, that we think it's us.
• 1:07:23
  We think this is us doing the talking.
• 1:07:25
  But can you tease apart for us what you mean by that kind of, yeah, duality?
• 1:07:32
  Sure.
• 1:07:34
  Over the last few years as a psychologist, one of the things I've heard many times being described is this notion of an inner critic, right?
• 1:07:40
  We hear an inner critic and we talk back to it and it's like a negative voice, this is negative things.
• 1:07:45
  And we go, well, I'm a good person.
• 1:07:47
  No, you're not, you're useless, you're worthless, you'll never amount to anything.
• 1:07:50
  No, I will, I can do it.
• 1:07:52
  And that never resonated for me.
• 1:07:54
  I struggled with my mental health when I was a teenager, I was suicidal for a while, and I really was at a really low point.
• 1:08:02
  When I was in that zone, when I was depressed, and whenever I struggle with any mental health elements, it doesn't feel like there's a voice in my head that says, you know, this is my negative voice, and I'm being negative right now.
• 1:08:13
  It feels like the truth.
• 1:08:15
  And that's why I use the term inner dictator to describe the voice inside my head.
• 1:08:20
  and the inner dictator is spewing the inner propaganda.
• 1:08:22
  Because it's a voice full of conviction, of absolute certainty that this is the way the world is.
• 1:08:28
  You are useless, you will never achieve anything, you're not gonna be able to do it.
• 1:08:31
  In fact, remember this, and there's a concept in psychology called mood congruent cognition, which basically means that whenever you're in a certain mood, your brain will look for information that supports that, look for memories that reminds you of just how useless you are, or gets you to imagine things in the future of how useless.
• 1:08:46
  So I always noticed that there was this sense of certainty conviction that I felt all the way through.
• 1:08:53
  And so with this nature of me calling it in a propaganda or calling it an inner dictator, it's because it's one of the most important things I ever did for my own mental health.
• 1:09:04
  It gave me the ability to go, hang on a second.
• 1:09:07
  I don't have to trust it just because I'm thinking it or feeling it or believing it, right?
• 1:09:13
  It doesn't mean it's wrong.
• 1:09:15
  It just doesn't mean it's right either.
• 1:09:17
  And just giving myself a little bit of a gift of, let me be a little bit more nuanced.
• 1:09:21
  And let me challenge this.
• 1:09:22
  Let me look at this differently.
• 1:09:24
  that allowed me to step back and it helped me to get through the tougher times.
• 1:09:29
  Because it means that just because it seems true doesn't make it true.
• 1:09:33
  It's like if you've ever been on ayahuasca mushrooms or you've been really, really drunk or you're high or whatever, you don't see the world as it is.
• 1:09:43
  You see the world through the lens of whatever chemical you're on.
• 1:09:45
  The same is true of our feelings.
• 1:09:47
  I'm sure.
• 1:09:47
  I'm sure.
• 1:09:48
  a lot of mystics will be criticizing you for that and saying maybe in ayahuasca you are seeing the world as it is for the first time.
• 1:09:54
  100%.
• 1:09:56
  We can set that aside.
• 1:09:58
  Yeah, yeah.
• 1:09:59
  And that's again what the shaman, when I did ayahuasca years ago, that's exactly what the shaman did.
• 1:10:03
  They said, this reveals what's really going on.
• 1:10:05
  But my point is what happens is that we are seeing the world through the lens of whatever feelings we're feeling.
• 1:10:11
  And that dictates where our attention goes.
• 1:10:13
  It dictates the stories that we sell to ourselves at that moment about what's happening.
• 1:10:16
  And so with this duality,
• 1:10:18
  What I'm trying to do is help people to realize whatever you're going through inside your head, it's just a form of propaganda.
• 1:10:25
  We all experience it.
• 1:10:26
  It doesn't mean we could shut it off, but it means as soon as you realize it, it means you no longer have to be a slave.
• 1:10:32
  Like I say the term convicts of our own convictions.
• 1:10:35
  You no longer have to be a convict of the beliefs that you have to hold you back to go.
• 1:10:39
  This is the only way that there is to be able to think.
• 1:10:41
  you can go into the nuance and you can start to go, maybe I can change my mind.
• 1:10:45
  And I think in this culture, sometimes we have this negative sort of quality associated with someone who changes their mind.
• 1:10:52
  From a political perspective, we call someone flaky or we say, you know...
• 1:10:57
  Oh, they don't have any strong beliefs.
• 1:11:00
  They're wish-washy in terms of their point of view.
• 1:11:02
  But I think the ability to change your mind is a good thing.
• 1:11:05
  I think it's good to be able to have more nuance in your perspective.
• 1:11:09
  And that's both for yourself, but it's also because the only shot I have to convince you
• 1:11:13
  is if you're still listening to me after five minutes.
• 1:11:16
  And if I'm willing to understand your point of view and connect with you on that, at least I have a shot at influencing your perspective on something.
• 1:11:25
  And any example like deep canvassing, which came about in the 2000s, and this was something that was a new approach to canvassing door to door.
• 1:11:34
  I think it was for gay marriage at the time in the States.
• 1:11:37
  And what they did was instead of the canvassers going around going, what's your opinion on gay marriage?
• 1:11:41
  The canvassers would go around going, what's your opinion?
• 1:11:44
  And then as the person said it, instead of arguing with them, the canvasser would listen.
• 1:11:49
  Would keep asking questions, would try to understand it, and then would just share their perspective.
• 1:11:53
  But the person that was being interviewed always felt respected, always felt that the other person that was asking the questions was genuinely interested and curious.
• 1:12:03
  And that showed, I think it was a 1% or 2% change, which was huge in terms of the decision that was made in terms of what to vote for.
• 1:12:15
  And this was back in the mid-2000s.
• 1:12:16
  There's a technique called deep canvassing.
• 1:12:18
  And they did more studies in 2016 or so in this.
• 1:12:24
  Once again, why did it work?
• 1:12:25
  It worked because when you're in a situation, if a person asks you a question, genuinely respects you, doesn't think you're a deplorable, doesn't think you're a Nazi, doesn't think you're a communist, just sees you as a person who has a different point of view, then you're much more likely to open yourself up, feel psychologically safe and be more open to a different perspective.
• 1:12:45
  And the more you investigate your own point of view as well, the more you go...
• 1:12:49
  haven't thought this true like you asked a question earlier josh which i think is a really important one is how many people have actually come to a conclusion based upon weighing up all the available evidence and said you know what based upon all of that i'm a democrat and i think a lot less people that we might think i think a lot of people find themselves locking onto or linking onto a couple of values or a couple of people or a certain tribal mentality and then that becomes who they are also don't think not to jump in and correct you but i mean i would also
• 1:13:19
  No one would research all of the facts and then arrive at the opinion, I should be a Democrat, which is what you just said.
• 1:13:28
  Because unless we believe that a political party at a particular point in time holds a monopoly on being right about everything...
• 1:13:37
  The facts are never going to – like this is what I find so odd about people's willingness to hold a collection of tribally affiliated ideas.
• 1:13:48
  Can they point to any other time or place in human history where a single group or party has been right about everything?
• 1:13:57
  I mean, are you the first people in the history of the world to be right about everything?
• 1:14:01
  Like, you know, the Australian Labor Party in 2026.
• 1:14:05
  This is like the first time in history that anyone has ever been right about all of the things.
• 1:14:10
  So to me, if you were actually going to look at, you know, if you were sufficiently galaxy brain to look at all of the facts, then it would have to be in a limited range.
• 1:14:20
  way about a particular issue and you could arrive at a conclusion about that issue.
• 1:14:24
  But the odds are that once you did that for every issue, from climate change to the Me Too movement to immigration to the way that migrant groups integrate into Western liberal democracies, to what we should do about money in politics, to whether or not we should tax mining companies more,
• 1:14:40
  to whether we should tax wealth, to all of these things.
• 1:14:44
  If you put them all down and you arrived at your conclusion about all of them, if you were genuinely an independent thinker, it's almost certain that they wouldn't all align with any other mainstream group in politics.
• 1:14:57
  Now, the weird thing is that as anyone who knows who's started doing more and more research, often the more research you do, the more uncertain you become, not more.
• 1:15:07
  I mean, I'm less certain about how I feel about
• 1:15:11
  the Israel and Palestine conflict today, now that I'm vastly more informed than I was three years ago, I'm less certain about how I feel about climate change now than I was three years ago.
• 1:15:25
  Like there's all kinds of things that, and that's not a coded way for me to say like, oh, I've been asking so many questions, but now I think the mainstream narrative really has some holes in it.
• 1:15:35
  I'm genuinely conflicted and go back and forth on,
• 1:15:40
  what the best way to respond to it is.
• 1:15:43
  So, yes, I would just point that out.
• 1:15:46
  I mean, the other interesting thing about your insight about the inner dictator, I find, is even if you remove it from the question of whether or not you can persuade people or convince people, just the fact of having a meta-messor
• 1:16:02
  relationship to your own inner monologue, by which I mean, you're one step removed from what your brain is telling you about the world instead of believing it to be true.
• 1:16:15
  There's a good analogy there to what I guess I'm trying to do with conversations, which is I sort of care less about the content of what we're talking about.
• 1:16:24
  And I care more about
• 1:16:26
  the way that we're doing the talking and the way that we're doing the thinking, right?
• 1:16:30
  Like I'm not, my game is not to push people towards particular positions, but it is to push people towards a particular way of standing in relation to positions, if that makes sense.
• 1:16:44
  And your work reminded me of that a little bit, but taking place within the confines of your skull instead of your society.
• 1:16:51
  I mean, I think, unfortunately, I think you're a unicorn in that sense.
• 1:16:55
  I think most of the time, like you call this uncomfortable conversations.
• 1:17:00
  People don't like uncomfortable.
• 1:17:02
  Most people don't like having uncomfortable conversations.
• 1:17:04
  Is that my problem?
• 1:17:05
  That's it.
• 1:17:06
  Because they call it uncomfortable, right?
• 1:17:09
  Like the word itself reveals it.
• 1:17:12
  But the people that are interested in uncomfortable conversations are the people that are willing to tolerate that ambiguity, tolerate that uncertainty.
• 1:17:19
  And to your point, the more you learn about something, the more uncertain you are because you're looking at and getting all the different data points and you're listening to the different narratives and there's a real story war.
• 1:17:29
  And we have to bring ourselves back to this unfortunate term.
• 1:17:32
  It's complicated.
• 1:17:33
  Now, that doesn't mean there isn't certain things we can point out to go wrong, right, terrible, amazing, right?
• 1:17:41
  We don't have to do that.
• 1:17:42
  When you go back to Nazi Germany, we don't have to go into the nuances, go, well, you know what?
• 1:17:46
  If we look at Nazi Germany, like there is no thing.
• 1:17:48
  We can see the disgusting atrocities committed in that context.
• 1:17:54
  I do wonder about that, though, Owen.
• 1:17:55
  I mean, I sometimes do just in an introspective way because, of course, we know what Nazi Germany was now because it all happened.
• 1:18:03
  But the question isn't whether you know it in hindsight.
• 1:18:06
  The question is whether you know it in advance.
• 1:18:08
  And I do sometimes wonder, you know, because this is the most common criticism that's leveled towards my way of doing things, which is, you know, oh, if you were in Germany in 1933, you'd be the one trying to understand the Nazis and like talk to the Nazis instead of fighting them.
• 1:18:23
  This comes mostly from the left who want to call Trump a fascist and, you know, and take to the streets.
• 1:18:29
  And I guess my only answer is that maybe if more people in Germany in the 1920s had tried to understand what each other were going through, it's conceivable in some universe that it could have been less hot.
• 1:18:51
  I agree with you.
• 1:18:53
  And I think that I don't think that it's a majority perspective, at least not in the conversations I've had.
• 1:18:59
  I think that maybe it's an optimistic point of view.
• 1:19:02
  But I believe that we can guarantee one thing.
• 1:19:05
  If we don't try to understand the other side, we're never going to have a shot at influencing them.
• 1:19:11
  And I think that's what's been happening for so long.
• 1:19:13
  If you
• 1:19:18
  People are like preaching to the converted the whole time.
• 1:19:21
  And all they're doing is galvanizing people.
• 1:19:23
  People listen in and tune in to whoever they choose as their expert on this space.
• 1:19:29
  And they love listening to it.
• 1:19:30
  I'm the same, right?
• 1:19:31
  I noticed myself on social media.
• 1:19:33
  I scroll and I listen to it.
• 1:19:34
  And I hear someone saying something I agree with about some issue.
• 1:19:38
  And I listen to them more.
• 1:19:40
  But then my brain, my other part of my brain is going, no, no, no.
• 1:19:43
  You need to force yourself to listen to the other side.
• 1:19:45
  And it's physically uncomfortable.
• 1:19:47
  I don't like listening to a side that I disagree with, but it's like eating vegetables.
• 1:19:51
  I don't like them, but I need to eat them as well as ice cream.
• 1:19:54
  And that's how I see it.
• 1:19:55
  I see it as the diet that we often take in is a diet that feels good and it feels right to us.
• 1:20:01
  But if we are to get out of this, I think, you know, mess that we're in from a philosophical, psychological, political, economical, social perspective, when there's such a division in society,
• 1:20:14
  We need to do the service of forcing ourselves to look at the point of view and not to go, oh, my goodness, I can't believe he said that.
• 1:20:20
  What a dumb idiot.
• 1:20:21
  He's such a because that's the problem.
• 1:20:23
  It's that we're filtering it through the narrative as opposed to trying to understand them.
• 1:20:27
  Again, let's take the Nazi Germany case.
• 1:20:30
  One of the most amazing books I read is called Address Unknown.
• 1:20:34
  And I can't remember the second.
• 1:20:35
  It was Catherine Kessler, I think.
• 1:20:37
  But it's about the story of an American Jew who is friends with a German.
• 1:20:42
  And they meet, I think, in the 20s or 30s.
• 1:20:45
  And they stay pen pals.
• 1:20:47
  And through the 1930s, the whole story is told in letters to each other.
• 1:20:53
  But you can see slowly but surely the shift in.
• 1:20:58
  in the mentality of the German as they move from friends with this American Jew to being more and more radicalized.
• 1:21:05
  And I think that that was so fascinating for me because, again, when I was talking to people in Afghanistan or chatting to people in North Korea,
• 1:21:14
  I really did the best I could not to turn around and go, what?
• 1:21:18
  You believe in stoning?
• 1:21:19
  Stoning is a thing.
• 1:21:20
  That's the most disgusting.
• 1:21:21
  Because what good would that do?
• 1:21:23
  Just because I have an attack of moral, let's say, courage, where I go, no, stoning is wrong.
• 1:21:30
  How is that going to help anything?
• 1:21:33
  It's not going to make a difference to the other person.
• 1:21:35
  They're not going to go...
• 1:21:36
  Owen Fitzpatrick thinks stoning is a bad thing.
• 1:21:38
  Oh my goodness.
• 1:21:39
  Hey, everyone, come here, come here.
• 1:21:41
  We can't do stoning anymore.
• 1:21:42
  Owen Fitzpatrick, who is he?
• 1:21:43
  He's a psychotic.
• 1:21:44
  No one cares what Owen thinks.
• 1:21:46
  So what I want to do is understand it.
• 1:21:48
  And that doesn't mean I condone it just because I don't turn around and rah, rah, rah.
• 1:21:52
  But I want to understand it because the only shot we have at changing the minds of the people that are causing the things that we see as being the atrocities is to try to understand and connect and
• 1:22:05
  find a way to be able to get into their mind and stop falling into this trap of villainizing people to the point where we dismiss them and then we just attack.
• 1:22:15
  And I think power rests on belief before it rests on force.
• 1:22:19
  In order to get people to the point where you galvanize them to attack, you have to convince them.
• 1:22:24
  And I think at the moment, the storytellers in society, let's say, are convinced that these are the people that we're against.
• 1:22:29
  These are the evil ones.
• 1:22:32
  And they're dividing us so effortlessly and easily because they're using human psychology.
• 1:22:36
  And the more we understand the bullshit that's happening inside our head, the more we go,
• 1:22:40
  I'm bullshitting myself right now.
• 1:22:42
  I'm lying to myself.
• 1:22:43
  I'm tricking myself.
• 1:22:44
  And it doesn't mean that I'm going to turn around and believe the opposite and jump to Uncle Bob's point of view on it.
• 1:22:50
  Right?
• 1:22:50
  Maybe I'm not useless.
• 1:22:51
  Uncle Bob.
• 1:22:51
  Like, it's like ChatGPT.
• 1:22:53
  You type into it, what do you think of me, ChatGPT?
• 1:22:56
  And ChatGPT says, you're the smartest person I've ever met.
• 1:22:58
  Oh, my God, your insights are genius.
• 1:23:01
  But...
• 1:23:01
  that it's not right.
• 1:23:03
  So we don't go from one extreme to another.
• 1:23:04
  It's right in my case, obviously, but it's not right in everyone else's case.
• 1:23:08
  Yes, but you're the only universal example of that.
• 1:23:12
  But the truth lies somewhere in the middle and we might not even get to the truth, but the only shot we have is to live in the middle and try to understand it so that we can build a better world.
• 1:23:23
  It's a better shot we have to influence someone.
• 1:23:25
  So the conversations you have
• 1:23:27
  I believe have a better shot at changing a person's mind than someone who is very militant or very extreme in their perspective.
• 1:23:37
  Because with you, they go, well, he kind of believes this, but he also kind of believes this, which is, I don't even know what he believed, but it's, it's, he's made a good point.
• 1:23:46
  And they're more likely to listen to you and change their mind, but you're not going to get the people that are already dogmatic,
• 1:23:54
  I think that's an important thing qualifier as well, because some people think if they think that this conversation is naive or Pollyanna, it's important to note, nobody needs to get Hitler to change his mind about Nazism.
• 1:24:06
  And nobody needs to get Trump to change his mind about Trumpism.
• 1:24:09
  The point is that those people can only do the damage that they can do because of a well of people, some of whom are presumably winnable, or would have been at some point in the path to get there.
• 1:24:22
  And as soon as you say the word, let's say Trump, what I'd invite people to do is if you're a big Trump supporter and you feel bad about the fact that the word Trumpism was used and used in the same sentence as Hitler, is to be able to look at that as the first step to go, just because you believe that, let's say Trump is such a benevolent person or whatever, doesn't mean you can't listen to a different point of view or perspective.
• 1:24:49
  Like just because we use certain words, does it, if you disagree with me about-
• 1:25:04
  But again, we will make those mistakes and we will be on sides that people disagree with.
• 1:25:09
  But what I want when I'm trying to get more people to do, because this is something I'm endeavoring to do myself all the time, is I'm trying to get more people to go, just because I disagree with Josh on topic A doesn't mean I disagree with him on topic B.
• 1:25:23
  And maybe I'm going to listen to him.
• 1:25:24
  But I always, you know, there's certain people I respect in terms of the point of view when it comes to, let's say, psychology.
• 1:25:30
  But when they talk about politics, I'm like...
• 1:25:33
  you know, nonsense, because it's so dogmatic.
• 1:25:36
  It's just one way.
• 1:25:37
  It's like, this is the highway.
• 1:25:39
  And it's so blinded by a hatred.
• 1:25:41
  We talk about Trump derangement syndrome.
• 1:25:43
  There's all sorts.
• 1:25:44
  There's Trump derangement syndrome, Democrat derangement syndrome.
• 1:25:48
  There's lots of variations.
• 1:25:50
  But the thing they all have in common is, because I don't want to listen to you, I'm just going to buy, I'm going to keep drinking my own flavor.
• 1:25:58
  I'm just going to keep going down this.
• 1:25:59
  And I think we need to call this out more.
• 1:26:01
  I think what I need to call out more is your overuse of flavor aid.
• 1:26:05
  And I think it's important if I have one mission in LIFO and it's going to be to convert you to calling it Kool-Aid henceforth.
• 1:26:11
  Yes.
• 1:26:12
  The book is in a propaganda on your final bracing message of unity and comedy.
• 1:26:18
  I think we will leave it there.
• 1:26:20
  Lovely to talk to you on the last night.
• 1:26:22
  A real pleasure.
• 1:26:23
  Thanks so much, Josh.